Wish you were there
There’s weird business and there’s weird business. Sometimes you don’t believe it actually exists, until you meet the guy doing it.
Alexei trades souvenirs. Not just matryoshkas and little replicas of St. Basil’s Cathedral – oh no. He deals in souvenirs from all over the world. For people who weren’t there, yet still want to impress their friends.
When I exchanged the Moscow heat for the cool breeze of Rio de Janeiro last week, I suddenly found a little souvenir that seemed very familiar. I’d seen the little wooden miniature of the enormous statue of Christ that hovers over Rio before – in Alexei’s crammed Moscow apartment.
“It sells for 1,700 rubles each. Brazil is far away and Aeroflot doesn’t fly there,” Alexei once told me, explaining why something that costs next to nothing can set you back quite a lot of money.
Little plastic Eiffel Towers are cheaper, and cost only 500 roubles, Alexei says. “Other sights and souvenirs for Europe are around that price – I buy most of it in China anyhow.” Wearing a cheap suit and dark shades, Alexei is the personification of the Russian word “biznesmen”. Only he pronounces it without any vowels at all, more like “bzznssmn”.
Some of his clients work so hard they don’t have time to travel, he says, while others forgot to buy souvenirs in places they visited. But by far the biggest number are people cheating on their loved ones.
“It’s easy. You say you’re on a business trip to France, while in fact you’re with your lover in a rented cottage outside of Moscow. The little Eiffel Tower is the perfect alibi,”
he says with a smirk.
To complete the tale, Alexei teams up with an international company selling and sending postcards from all over the world. You can order a blank postcard from any place on earth, fill it in and send it back. The recipient gets the card with a postmark from that country.
“In same cases it takes a bit too long for the cards to arrive, but in Russia you can always blame the slow postal service,” Alexei says, laughing.
It is, however, a business with risks. “Sometimes it gets out of hand,” says Alexei. “Once when I tried to buy a carpet from Iran, I transferred a lot of money to Tehran and never got anything back.”
“And what about the wrecked marriages?” I ask.
“Not really my business,” he says. “That’s the funny bit – once people start lying, they get hooked on the service. It’s almost impossible for them to stop. It’s honesty that kills my business.”
The hardest part is getting your hands on the souvenirs, it seems. “Capital cities are easy, but try getting something from deepest Africa or some remote Pacific Island,” he says.
But with the help of eBay and a network of people around the world involved in similar undertakings, he tries his best to deliver. And if there’s no other way, Alexei even gets on the plane himself.
“Last year somebody wanted coral from the Maldives, but I flew to Egypt to get it instead. It looks more or less the same,” he says. “I mean, if your bzznss is lies, it’s alright to employ a little dishonesty yourself once in a while.”
Illustration by Evgeni Vasiliev
